Empty nest conversations

There is a strange absence of young adults in our neighbourhood. My wife, who is a bit of a busybody, tells me this is because everyone’s grown-up children have left home, leaving their middle-aged parents without an anchor. Some got married and moved away; others went overseas to study and stayed back; still others decided they wanted to give independent living a shot. “It must feel strange,” said my wife wistfully, imagining the extra rooms at home as gyms, libraries or coffee parlours, as her friends have done. “I could use a walk-in cupboard,” she mentioned to our daughter, who bolted her bedroom door and said she wasn’t likely to be moving any time soon so could her mother please be less obviously predatory.

I don’t know about others but I wouldn’t take dibs on our experiencing the empty nest syndrome. When we were first married, my wife used to hiss at me, “Don’t call it an open house because people” — meaning our relatives — “take it literally.” It is true that we seemed to have more guests boarding with us than others did, as a result my wife and I forgot what it was like to talk to each other. I’d learn more about her views regarding a book she’d read, or a film she’d seen, from others rather than from her. If our life wasn’t about my in-laws’ coming, it was about her cousins’ goings. The only notes we compared had to do with the planning of the laundry, meals and sleep stations.

So, talk we did, but nothing that seemed beyond mere routine. “You’ll need to send the driver to pick up your aunt from the station,” she would say. I’d tell her about the repairmen who were due in to replace a gadget, or piece of furniture, a careless guest might have damaged. My children seemed to know more about goings-on in my office than my wife did. She insisted I never heard a thing she said to me, which was true because I don’t think she said it to me in the first place. We partied together — a lot — because that didn’t require us to talk to each other, and it would be weeks before a conversation, or argument, occurred.

On those occasions when our children were travelling at the same time, the house became a crypt. My wife, who cribbed about a full house when we were younger, could no longer bear it less habited. “Can we have the Mehras over?” she’d ask, as I’d be leaving for work. Or command me to be home early because she’d decided to call her school friends, who she hadn’t met in three decades, all the way from Kolkata, and would I mind my manners and speak only when spoken to. I’d promise to do her bidding, but from what she usually said afterwards, I probably broke the pact more often than I kept it.

There has never been the absence of sound at home, but too often now there is an absence of words instead. And not just because of the kids’ increasing peregrinations away from the city, but because they seem to come home later and later every day — whether because they’re working hard, or socialising even harder. Even when they’re home, they seem to spend all their time on the phone, with their laptops or the TV. The nest’s beginning to feel a little lonely. I think it’s time my wife and I started talking to each other — again.